


The Quiet Place

by RedSneakers



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Speculation, spoilers until season 2 winter finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-16
Updated: 2015-02-16
Packaged: 2018-03-13 06:29:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3371279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedSneakers/pseuds/RedSneakers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Is it even possible to find a quiet place inside a metal box covered with glass where everyone would watch her like she was a monkey in a zoo?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Quiet Place

**Author's Note:**

> Hullo! I'm back with another May/Skye fic. This is my take after seeing the promo trailer (can March be here now?!) so it may not be accurate whatsoever; those who know me know that accurate and I rarely sit well on the same bench. Anyway, you also know that I only ship May and Skye as mother/daughter... so, if you're looking for something romantic, you will be disappointed. 
> 
> There's some reference to my other May/Skye fic on this story (only at the end, but I won't pass a chance to do a self promotion - so please, read Slipping Through Her Fingers, kind people!)
> 
> This work is unbeta-ed, and I am really, really sick right now (I'm 31 years old and am currently down with chicken pox) so I don't really feel like editing anything. Will do some edits later when I'm better, though. 
> 
> Disclaimer: Sadly, the only thing that I own here is my mistakes.
> 
> Okay, gonna shut up now. Please grab a brownie or two (I swear they're not infested with virus - my mummy made them) while you're at it.

It’d been a week since she got out of the hell hole – no, since _they_ got her out. Had it really only been a week? Or a month? Or only yesterday, even? Skye had lost tracks of how long time had passed. She remembered that they had put her in the medical bay together with Mack (and Coulson?) at first. She vaguely remembered the time they suddenly wheeled her out of the room into a fancy metal box they called the ‘quarantine area’ – she wasn’t sure, but she recalled that there had been some explosion involved.

Skye spent her time staring at the metal ceiling, not thinking – or rather, _trying_ not to think – about anything. For outside observer, she looked mostly catatonic. She gave very little response to people talking to her. When she did respond, she looked like a lost puppy. It wasn’t that Skye was trying to be difficult; it was that everything was so jumbled up inside her head that she found it impossible for her to form a coherent sentence. It was like her mind was trying to say a lot of things at the same time; it was so loud inside her head that she could not think clearly. She was hoping that someone – anyone at all – would understand.

The brunette kept seeing Tripps everywhere and it was like living a nightmare. She would see a glimpse of him walking round the corner of the quarantine area, and her throat would close with unshed tears each time. She would see him in her dreams; the image of him staring at her with empty eyes before he disintegrated into dust overwhelmed her with guilt so intense Skye felt she was drowning.

Her solitude was killing her and it was relieving for her to have people come to see her even though they rarely had interaction with her. But it was only at first. She began to hate company in the end. She learned to hate the way Simmons would look at her when the British would do her daily visits to check her vitals. She learned to be angry at the way Bobbi or Hunter would occasionally walk past her quarantine box with glances they must have thought she didn’t see.

Above all, she learned to despise Fitz the most; the young man would hover all day long, his eyes asked her millions of unvoiced questions. Skye hated him the most because now she knew how it felt to be trapped inside her own head. She loathed him for still wanting to ask her questions. Couldn’t he see that it was as difficult for her to answer as it was for him to speak? He was supposed to be the only person who understood! And yet, he didn’t.

Coulson’s company was the second worst. It was as if he never left the room. He’d ordered people to put a camera in the box and stream live feed to his office and vice versa. He would start talking to Skye from his office at odd times, and while sometimes the interruption was necessary for Skye to not overthink, most of the time she felt like her basic rights were violated. She felt like she was no longer treated like human. She felt like she was a monkey in a zoo, open for people to look and gawk at.

The only person whose presence Skye would have tolerated was May’s. She didn’t know if it was because the older agent never seemed to be around or if she really wanted to see her S.O. At times Skye thought she’d seen a glimpse of May from the corner of her eyes, but when she turned around the senior agent was nowhere to be seen.

By the time she could think of something else aside from Tripps, her mind was occupied with thoughts of May. Where was May? Why didn’t she come to visit Skye? Was she avoiding Skye? She wanted to ask Coulson but the words seemed to always die on the tip of her tongue. And when she couldn’t say what she meant, she would began to feel frustrated. And her bed would begin to shake.

“Skye?” Fitz’s unsure tone snapped her out of her reverie. As usual, he was standing a couple of steps away from the glass door. “Skye, you okay?”

No, she was not. Skye was breathing hard and she could feel blood rushing in her veins, creating some sort of visible tremor of her bed. _Stop!_ Skye chided herself in vain – how could she possibly think that she could control whatever was now happening if she didn’t know what was causing it.

From where she was she could see fear seeping into Fitz’s eyes, and it was like adding one last drop to her already too full dam. She could literally hear the loud crack of her dam breaking.

She didn’t see how the surgical lamp by her bedside began to crackle. The young woman only noticed that something was terribly wrong when she saw Fitz’ face scrunch up in horror as he was staring at something behind her and when she smelled something burning. Before she could turn around to see what Fitz was looking at, the lamp exploded with a loud bang. Skye screamed. And again, her bed began to shake.

Her heart was pounding in her ears. Skye squeezed her eyes shut and pressed at her ears with both hands, hoping that the poundings would stop. It hurt. Then, in the midst of confusion, she felt it – a foreign rush inside of her like waves of electricity trying to get out, trying to connect with something.

For a moment, Skye’s world was silent. She opened her eyes and saw Coulson in front of her. With May. A tear rolled down her cheek. “Help… me,” she managed to croak before everything turned into darkness.

* * *

 

There was a steady beeping of the heart monitor machine next to her bed when Skye finally came to. It took her a while before she could open her eyes, and she sighed in relief to find that the room she was in was semi-dark; the only source of light was the many monitors around her. Skye felt so drained; it was a toll trying to move her body, so she just lay there and took the place in with her eyes. They put her in another quarantine area, it seemed.

Right then, her peripheral vision caught a shadow of something out of place right next to the sliding door. She did a double take, realizing that it wasn’t a thing – it was a person.

“May,” Skye whispered.

The shadow moved and Skye almost cried when she finally saw her S.O. again as the older agent approached her bed.

“May…,” she repeated, louder this time. She opened her mouth to speak more and found that words failed her again this time. It was exasperating and Skye could again feel something stirring inside of her.

All the while, May kept an eye on her protégé. At the first sign of panic in the young woman’s eyes, even before there was a slight shake on the ground beneath her feet, May reacted. “Skye.” She coaxed the other woman to look at her. “Breathe.”

The calm yet authoritative tone May used somehow centered Skye. As she slowly took a long, cleansing breath, Skye felt the hot rush in her vein subside. She took another deep breath, then another one before it was completely gone – or, at least, at bay.

“Breathe,” the senior agent repeated as if breathing would help Skye solve her problems. Funnily enough, Skye noted vaguely, it did help a little.

May nodded approvingly when Skye continued to take deep breaths. She moved closer to the bed, adjust the inclination of the bed so that Skye was half sitting down, and lowered the railings on one side. She raised an eyebrow when Skye looked like she was going to protest that May sat on her bed. “Problem?”

Skye blushed a little. “I… I don’t want to hurt you,” she admitted. It was a little… odd, to be able to speak to May again.

“Like you can,” May deadpanned. Skye could have sworn she saw a glint of mirth in her S.O.’s eyes, but it was gone in a flash.

Skye lowered her head. _The old me can’t_ , she thought sorrowfully, _this me - I'm not so sure_. She stared at her hands. She knew that something didn’t sit right with her – that something in her had changed ever since that day in the cave after she was wrapped in a cocoon of black matter; that she was no longer the same person. However, she couldn’t put her fingers on what had changed, on what she had become. Was she even still human? Or something else?

 “Skye, look at me,” May said, breaking the silence between them.

The younger woman lifted her head and leveled their eyes. Listening to May’s voice gave her a sense of normalcy – she’d become so used to following May’s order that she didn’t need to think to do just as told.

“I’m still trying to find an answer, Skye,” May began, not breaking their eye contact as she spoke. “And I promise you I will not stop until I find one. You hear that?” She needed Skye to know that there was at least one person in the whole facility who would never stop looking, that she would find the answer Skye was looking for if it was the last thing she did.

“I’m hurting people.”

“No, you’re not.”

Skye waved a hand. “Whom are you trying to fool, May? You saw what I did to the lamp! It’s not human! Who knows what I can do to peop– oh damn it!” Skye balled her fist when the bed began to shake along with her rising anger.

May seemed to be unfazed with it. She looked at Skye dead in the eye and told her to control her breathing, waiting until Skye followed her instruction and until the bed stop shaking. “See? Not hurting people.”

There was so much trust in May’s voice that Skye felt her eyes filled with hot tears. This kind of interaction with May was new to her and Skye could feel how much May cared for her despite the older woman’s not showing much on the surface.

“I killed Tripps,” Skye whispered. This was the first time she actually mentioned his name out loud. “I got him killed.”

“Those are two very different things,” May pointed out.

Skye glared at her mentor through her tears, annoyed that May would choose this moment to argue over semantics.

“How did you kill him?”

It was a blunt question and Skye blinked at the lack of sugar-coating. “Wha..?”

“How did you get him killed?”

Skye stared at May with her mouth agape for a moment, not knowing what to say. Flashes of memories replayed in her head: Tripps following her into the cave, the obelisk starting to glow, black matter creeping toward her and starting to envelope her, her screaming for Tripps’ to help, the heat and prickly sensation inside the cocoon before it crumbled, the way her cells humming, Tripps dead eyes… Skye felt a bile rose up her throat.

“I’m going to be sick,” she mumbled. She emptied the content of her stomach into a bucket May had quickly grabbed before she could finish the sentence. It was embarrassing to have May stand a couple of steps away as she retched, and it was downright mortifying to see the older agent unflinchingly clean up after she was finished.

Some time when she was violently vomiting, she noticed that the door had slid open – revealing a very worried Simmons, who halted in surprise at the sight of May holding Skye’s hair while the other woman was doing her nasty business. It was not until she’d had a glass of water and lain back down that she realize Simmons were nowhere to be seen. She loosely recalled that May’d quietly told the scientist to go back to bed, that May got this.

Skye wasn’t used to being treated like this – not by this woman who was now sitting in front of her. She wasn’t sure if she liked it. But she was sure that she didn’t dislike it.

“I’m sorry.” She felt like a little girl under the scrutinizing eyes.

May smiled a little but said nothing. She was thinking hard, mulling at things to say to this woman before her, which was difficult – because there was actually nothing she could say that could make things better.

“May?”

“Huh?”

“Everything okay?”

The S.O. paused for a moment. “After I… returned from Bahrain,” she began haltingly, taking note on how Skye’s eyes began to lit up at the mention of the place. “Yes, Skye, I know you’ve heard about Bahrain from Coulson.”

“He only said that you changed,” Skye remarked, not wanting Coulson to get in trouble with May for revealing the agent’s past.

“I know what he said,” replied May with a smile of assurance that nobody was in trouble. Her smile faltered when she began again, “Well, after Bahrain… I…” May shook her head, not sure where to begin and how she should begin. She closed her eyes for a moment and took a calming breath, convincing herself that Skye needed to hear this. “It took me a long time to learn not to see myself as a monster.”

Skye’s eyes widened in surprise at the confession and she couldn’t tear her eyes off May’s dark ones as the older woman locked their gaze.

“I was just beginning to learn it when I held the Berserker staff. And everything fell apart,” she confessed.

“You’re not a monster, May,” Skye spoke softly, her heart constricted with the pain she felt for May.

“And what makes you think you are?” Before Skye could come up with a million excuses, she went on, “No, Skye – don’t answer just yet. Think. If you can say that I, who had killed innocent people in the most brutal way possible without batting an eye, am not a monster – what makes you think you are? You – who haven’t done anything wrong. You – whose only mistake is probably not knowing what is happening to yourself!”

“I killed Tripps!” Skye almost yelled, “I got him killed! He’d probably be alive if he didn’t follow me to the cave!”

“And how is that your fault, Skye?” May asked coldly, “You didn’t ask him to follow you. It was his decision to do so.”

“So what? You’re saying it was his mistake he died?”

“Yes.” May knew she was being harsh – but she was willing to be the bad guy, the monster, if it was what it took to make Skye see.

Skye saw red. How could May say so? How could she? The brunette saw the thick glass separating the quarantine area begin to vibrate and her eyes widened. The blazing anger inside of her dissipated in an instant, replaced with horror. She shut her eyes, hoping that the vibration would stop if she didn’t see it. Her body shook uncontrollably as she tried to back away from May, who remained seated. “No… no – May, get out of here!”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“May, please! I don’t want to hurt you!” May stood up, but instead of backing out of the room, she walked closer to Skye. Before Skye knew it, she was enveloped by a pair of strong arms which pulled her into an embrace.

“You can’t hurt me if you try, Skye,” May whispered in her ear. “I’m not going anywhere.” _I’m not letting you go – not again_ , she thought.

And those were the only words Skye needed to hear. She raised her arms and awkwardly returned May’s hug. When she opened her eyes, the glass had stopped vibrating. The humming sound in her ears had faded. Her mind was at peace.

Everything was quiet.

 


End file.
